A collaborative computing environment employs some form of communication between computing systems, such as a messaging system for message exchange. In such systems, messages can take virtually any form, such as extensible markup language (XML) format, and can include any type of various content, such as a document, file, list, etc. Messaging systems typically use some form of routing scheme to guide messages from a sender to one or more intended recipients. Routing is conventionally directed by header information appended to the content of the message at or near the sender.
Increasingly, however, access to the content or “payload” of a message is often needed. For instance, business applications in a heterogeneous computing environment can communicate with each other through a message exchange infrastructure, such as provided by SAP of Walldorf, Germany. The exchange infrastructure and/or the applications may need to access the content of a request message from one application to another in order to fulfill their tasks. Several examples of these tasks include message routing and business process management. For example, a routing rule may be established, such as: “When Plant ‘01’ is present in a message, then the receiver system is ‘X’.” In another example, a business process may require of an application, based on a message content: “When Sales Organization is ‘01’ then wait for a confirmation.”
Access to message content data is traditionally done via Xpath expressions, however such access is sometimes very cumbersome and typically very technical. An easier message content access technique is needed, and that can be employed across different interfaces.